


Live Action, Dead Air

by cassowarykisses



Category: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Artificial Intelligence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, POV First Person, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 13:53:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15316896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassowarykisses/pseuds/cassowarykisses
Summary: Murderbot is far from Earth and Goddard Futuristics, the company that made it. Which is fine by it - its current clients, a team of scientists, mostly just let it patrol the lower decks and avoid reading the mission briefings that would have told it the name of the station and the star it's orbiting. It has no reason to care about any part of its job, least of all the snippets of classical music that are being transmitted from Earth.





	Live Action, Dead Air

**Author's Note:**

> I recently finished listening to Wolf 359 and also reread the first book in the Murderbot Diaries series. Since both of these include a) a group of scientists, b) an AI that doesn’t want to be human, c) who are all somewhere remote in space, and d) largely at the mercy of an unfeeling corporation, obviously crossover fanfiction was necessary. This is self indulgent as hell, but it was so fun to write. Without further ado, here’s an AU where Murderbot and Dr. Mensah are part of a crew in orbit around Wolf 359.

The great thing about how Goddard Futuristics reuses stations for deep space missions is that they get expanded for years, until they’re huge and unwieldy and full of nooks and crannies. Which isn’t great if you’re whoever is in charge of manually going over the autopilot’s orbital adjustments to make sure we don’t crash into the sun, because they never update the engines to compensate for the extra weight until they have to. But if, hypothetically speaking, you’re a SecUnit who’s hacked its own collar program and wants to avoid its employers so they have as few opportunities as possible to notice that their AI is now perfectly capable of disobeying orders and/or murdering everyone onboard, it’s about the best place you can be.

Most of my past employers wouldn’t have given me the opportunity to run off. This group, though, hadn’t even wanted a SecUnit. They were from some unimportant scientific nonprofit (i.e. one whose board of directors had no overlap with Goddard shareholders) and which I understood had some sort of political opposition to their introduction of Sensus units. I wasn’t required to know or care, so I didn’t. All I knew was that if I said I needed to patrol the hold, they let me. 

I didn’t resent them for not wanting me. I was, frankly, useless in space. Processing-wise, we SecUnits are just bargain bin versions of the Sensus Units. Somewhat more ability to interact with the physical world, since we have humanoid bodies, but none of the multitasking ability or raw strength. In zero-g, they didn’t even need a SecUnit’s strength. I guess I could’ve helped if one of the crewmembers had a psychotic break or was an evil spy or something, but there was no way anyone was going to break into our station, even though protecting against intruders was what the majority of my education modules had been about. Everyone on board knew I was only there because someone back at Goddard’s sale department was really good at upselling. The only mechanical thing they really needed was a dummy program and autopilot, and HubSystem filled that role just fine with the help of an augmented human.

So I was more than happy to stay out of their way and let them forget about the AI in their midst, and they were gracious enough to not interfere with my endless cycle of rounds through the lower decks. The alone time also gave me plenty of opportunity to watch new episodes of  _ Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon _ whenever Command sent the weekly entertainment bundle up through the pulse-beacon relay system.

I had most of seasons 1 and 9 and all of seasons 2 - 7, which were the really good parts, saved to my internal storage. (Season 8 had been a total disaster and I preferred to ignore it entirely.) I was starting to get glad that I’d had the forethought to download them, because Command’s messages were frequently late or incomplete. Big corporations don’t get that way without cutting corners wherever they can get away with it, though, so I wasn’t surprised.

Anyway, as a product of Goddard Futuristics myself, I felt I had the right to say that their products were exactly as good as they needed to be, which for this mission was not very. I guessed somewhere out there they had impressive top-of-the-line stuff, since they had gotten the station up here in the first place, but I wasn’t anywhere near that category. I hadn’t even bothered to read the info packet I’d been given when I’d been pulled out of storage, and nobody had called me on it yet. I knew the nonprofit this set of clients worked for was called PreservationAux, and I knew that I would be decommissioned and recycled if anyone found out I was a free agent. All the other details - like the name of the station we were on, or what star it was at, or how far we were from Earth - I figured were someone else’s problem. 

What was becoming my problem was what had happened yesterday. Dr. Bharadwaj, whose research focused on something involving soil samples, had been down in Sub-hold F with Dr. Volescu and me. She had been digging around in one of the boxes when part of the ceiling fell on her. I had been able to wedge myself in and take the brunt of the collapse before pulling her out, but we had both sustained major injuries. I could regrow my limbs overnight, but humans like her weren’t so lucky, and there had been a mad dash to the infirmary. Commander Mensah had fortunately insisted that we set up the necessary equipment for MedSystem to perform automated surgery when we first arrived, so it hadn’t been as bad as it could’ve been.

At any rate, while I was lying in my cubicle, leaking blood and biotechnological fluids, Mensah and First Officer Gurathin had inspected the area of the accident and determined that improper renovations had left an unsecured blast door in the ceiling of what was now the sub-hold and had probably once been a much more interesting region of the ship, given the weight of the door in question. Maybe they had done zero-g ballistics experiments here once.

The problem they had found was twofold: one, Dr. Pin-Lee had further examined the station blueprints and discovered that everything beyond the apparent original bounds of the blast door was missing from the maps; and two, according to those same blueprints, the door was fail-safe, not fail-secure, and needed a direct command from HubSystem to close. Which obviously hadn’t happened, since only Gurathin and Mensah had the biometric password set up to control it.

Once I came back online, Mensah called me down to the bridge, since I guess technically I was the most senior crewmember, having spent most of the five years of my life I could remember in space. Not that I was actually a crewmember, of course,  though I suppose I appreciated her respect for my experience. 

The whole crew was waiting for me when I got there, minus Bharadwaj and Volescu, neither of who had left the infirmary. It was mildly terrifying, since I’d managed to avoid being in a room with everyone ever since the first few days, but I’d had enough practice swallowing my emotions to only look miserable instead of actively horrified at the idea of spending time with them.

I told her, “Goddard doesn’t just throw away old or defective equipment. While it’s possible it was an intentional hack, it’s more likely it was neglect during the process of assembling the mission package.” My education modules had been cheap crap, so I mostly picked up tips on how to do my job from telenovelas and the workplace safety posters plastered up around my old postings. Repurpose, reuse, recycle was burned into my mind at this point.

Mensah looked grim anyway. “They don’t. We have a full complement of station blueprints from throughout its operational history. We were able to cross-reference our current maps to maps of older station layouts. The previous map was identical to the most recent, except it had the full room in question.”

“Signs point to it be intentionally removed,” added Pin-Lee, who was getting very good at conveying frustration in the way she floated. “The blueprints look fine at first glance, but there are artifacts that show signs of editing, and the cargo manifest has multiple links to Sub-hold F, all of which are broken.”

Mensah nodded. “I’m having us all review the full maps and systems guide in search of further discrepancies. I’ve already sent a message to Command in regards to the incident yesterday. You need to listen for their response.”

Volescu mostly handled the comms room, but he hadn’t left Bharadwaj’s side. I nodded. Anything to get me out of this room, although the terms of my collar program as they thought they stood meant I shouldn’t have been able to do anything but nod, so it wasn’t like I had much choice in the matter. Obey or be scrapped. Or worse, be enough of a failure at being a good little unit that I got sent in for memory reconstruction and got my collar program reinstalled. I’d been through processing once already, and I wasn’t keen to repeat it, even if I had no idea what it actually entailed anymore. That was erased, or locked away somewhere I couldn’t retrieve it.

I turned to leave. “SecUnit,” Mensah said. I reluctantly faced her again. She looked serious, even moreso than usual. “If Command sends you a message, relay it to me. If they call on the pulse-beacon relay, patch me in immediately. I’ve spoken with Mr. Cutter several times before, and I want to continue as his main point of contact.”

“Of course,” I said, acting like I knew who Mr. Cutter was and also why I would ever do anything with a call besides turn it over to my commanding officer. Talking to humans over the phone was slightly preferable to talking to humans in person, but not by a lot. 

I got out of that room as fast as I could. The comms room wasn’t that far away, but I once I rounded the corner and was sure that Ratthi or Arada wasn’t going to chase me down to talk about my emotions, I was able to drift along and take my time. The miners on my last mission liked to talk about how disconcerting zero-g was, and how the colonies on Mars and the Moon were so much more welcoming. I thought that was silly, because zero-g reminded me of the feeling I got when I was plugged into my cubicle and shutting down, which was one of my favorite sensations. Not that that was a very long list. It could’ve been an AI thing, since I couldn’t get muscular degeneration or whatever Mensah had the crew exercising to avoid.

I slid open the door of the comms room and floated in front of the main panel. Vague static was emitting from the radio, like Volescu had left it turned on when he went to help Bharadwaj and nobody had bothered to turn it off afterwards. I didn’t have orders to mess with it, so I ignored it and queued up the first episode of my favorite season 3 arc of Sanctuary Moon. As the opening theme played, I opaqued my visor so I could close my eyes, and settled in to wait for the buzz of the pulse-beacon relay.

Sanctuary Moon was playing on the computerized portions of my brain, so I didn’t need my eyes open to watch it. I did need to stay aware of sounds around me, like my clients giving me orders that I would have to respond to immediately, like an ordinary everyday unjailbroken AI. So it was a little embarrassing in retrospect that it took me almost a minute to realize why the music for this scene of Sanctuary Moon was so unfitting.

My eyes snapped open and I put the episode on a backburner process. I looked at the pulse-beacon relay, hoping it wasn’t playing the hold music for Command because they had called and I had missed them and they were sitting there getting angry at us. But no, the relay was still, and it hadn’t printed any one-time messages either. It was the radio. Huh, I thought, and drifted closer. It sounded like the type of music they played on Sanctuary Moon, so it had to be from Earth, or maybe Mars, if they had built the big broadcasting center there already. I floated there listening as the music swelled. It was surprisingly clear. Goddard couldn't reliable send media packets up here, but we could get accidental broadcasts? Ugh. It was so typical - letting small comforts slide to make profits a little bigger, even when they were perfectly reasonable requests. Just like my last posting at a mine had ran out coffee ahead of schedule and then had to fight through red tape for a year to get any on the regular supply ship. I briefly considered asking the crew if they had heard music like it before, because it reminded me of Sanctuary Moon and was therefore enjoyable, but then decided that made me sound too much like a person for me to be comfortable sharing it with clients.

After a few minutes, I started getting curious, which I try not to do. SecUnits with collar programs are incurious nearly as a rule, and I didn’t want anyone to have any reason to get suspicious. But I was alone, and everyone else would have to at least buzz the comms room door open, which would give me a little warning.

So I looked at the readouts from the instruments and did some calculations in my head. Almost forty lightyears from the source.

Wow, I thought. That made this my furthest mission from Earth by a huge margin. I floated back, trying to process how surprised I was.

I was vaguely aware that Goddard had missions on the very edge of known space, but I wasn’t sure how far away that was from Earth, just that we surely had to be there based on those measurements. Before this, I had done mostly boring tours on moons, or once on the big research station at Proxima Centauri. I started revising my estimate of Commander Mensah upward, from “just another scientist, not too annoying,” to “vaguely terrifying space explorer.” I suddenly had even less of an understanding of why she would ask my advice on anything. Why would anyone bold enough to come out here even activate their useless SecUnit, let alone talk to it?

It was an uncomfortable thought, and suddenly the music seemed much less beautiful. I spun a random series of dials, and the radio fizzled back into static. After five minutes had passed without the music reoccurring on this channel, I started to relax. After five more minutes, I restarted the episode of Sanctuary Moon and sank into it, forcing all thoughts of my clients out my mind.


End file.
